“Don’t know,” was the unhappy reply.
Daniel Foster had been giving that same reply to other farmers for days. By this time of year, he was usually able to make a surprisingly accurate prediction of the winter to come. But since Annie Murphy’s first visit to the boulder on Pine Hill he had had no prophetic visions.
“Waal …” Liam Murphy drawled, rocking back on his heels, “reckon I better listen to Annie, then. She says we’re gonna have one helluva blizzard afore the week’s out. Then another and another, right on up to April with no letup at all, hardly. She says I oughta get all our feed and supplies in now, and I should order extra corn, bran for mash, blackstrap molasses …”
He went on, ticking off the list on his fingers while Foster listened with growing alarm. The feed-store owner was glad of the order, but dismayed to hear that Annie Murphy was now predicting the weather.
He had a dark suspicion as to how she was doing it.
Three days later a monster blizzard hit, well in advance of its usual season. By that time Liam had his stock in the barn, his loft crammed with feed, his firewood cut, additional flour and salt and thread purchased, carrots and turnips and potatoes snugly bedded in fresh hay in the root cellar, and was just doing a final check of the shingles on his roof when the first flurry began.
By the time he had come down off the roof and put his ladder away in the barn, the howling wind was so full of snow it was impossible to see more than a few feet. He returned to the cabin through the dogtrot and settled down in front of the fire with a sigh of satisfaction.
“Just made it, Annie. Thanks to you,” he said. If she had been acting strange lately, it was forgiven and forgotten in the relief of the moment.
Other farmers were not so fortunate.
20
The exceptionally early blizzard caught most people unprepared Livestock was trapped in the open and frozen. Great drifts blocked roads. Supplies ran low. People huddled together in snowy siege, measuring the level of oil in their lamps and food in their larders and worrying.
At last the snow abated, but only briefly. During that period men hurried into Conway from outlying districts, telling harrowing tales of blizzard losses and clamoring for supplies.
An angry band descended upon the Conway Feed Store. “Why didn’t you warn us, Dan’l?” they demanded to know. “Any time afore this, when there was a major storm a-comin’, you’ve let us know.”
“I didn’t know myself, this time,” Foster protested. But they were in no mood to be lenient.
“You’ve cost me!” Nathan Nesbitt accused. “You’ve cost me a heap o’ money in dead livestock, Foster, and I won’t forget it! Any other man wants to set up a feed store in this area, he’ll get my business afore you!”
There was a mutter of agreement.
Grudgingly, the men placed feed orders with Foster against the winter to come. But he could feel the resentment in them. Three generations of Fosters had prophesied local weather with uncanny accuracy. Until now.
They would not trust Daniel Foster again. That source of income had suddenly dried up.
Yet Annie Murphy had known about the blizzard.
“Annie Murphy robbed me,” Foster growled to his wife.
“How’d she do that?” Tabitha wondered. “She ain’t even been in town since harvest.”
“She robbed me,” he repeated stubbornly. “And I ain’t one to forget.”
Yet how could he prove it? he asked himself. How, without revealing his own involvement, could he accuse Annie Murphy of knowing the weather through ungodly means? Any mention of witchcraft on her part would bring the same accusation down on himself.
Besides, he was not certain it was witchcraft. His father had told him, “It’s a curse, boy. A curse on the Fosters for what my pa helped do to them Injuns. That there stone calls us out to it from time to time to remind us o’ what we done, and at the same time it makes us see things we got no business seein’.
“But when a man is faced with two evils, he’d be a pure fool not to try to make a profit outta at least one of’em,” the elder Foster had concluded.
Throughout his manhood Daniel Foster had made a good profit, indeed, from the visions the stone caused. Now that profit looked like it was being taken from him by a woman from another place entirely, a woman with no claim to it at all that he could see!
He raged silently, wondering how to get his own back. His wife, noticing that his mouth had become a thin, hard line, avoided him. She knew her man. As Annie Murphy had said, Daniel Foster could be mean.
He had a whole long, hard winter to brood on his loss. The weather was too unrelentingly savage, the roads too badly drifted to allow him to go out to the boulder on Pine Hill. But once mud season set in with the melting of the snow, he would. He vowed to return to the stone every chance he got, until he caught Annie Murphy there, stealing from him. Stealing his visions. Then he would … he would …
He was not sure what he would do. He had the whole long winter to brood about it, though. And if he forgot for a moment someone was bound to come into the store and remind him. “You sure messed up this time, Dan’l,” some man would say with the ill-concealed pleasure people take in pointing out the failings of others. “Lookit that snow out there. Heaviest since’45. And the earliest. How come you didn’t know, Dan’l? Eh? How come you didn’t know?”
Then his questioner would laugh a sly laugh at his obvious discomfort. And Foster would promise himself anew to be revenged somehow on Annie Murphy, when the snow finally melted and he could catch her sneaking out to the stone.
But Annie had no intention of ever returning to the boulder on Pine Hill. There was no need. From day to day, she knew what the weather was going to do before she opened her eyes in the morning. Her bones knew. The message was carried through them by the same energy that hummed through the granite of New Hampshire.
With the knowledge, came the visions.
Days might pass without one. Then, horrifically, just when she had begun to relax a little, she would find herself bonded with stone. With a mountain or a pebble or, occasionally, with the entire chain of the White Mountains themselves. In and of and with the mountains, her soul unwilling witness to geologic history.
“Annie’s got very strange,” a worried Liam at last confessed to his nearest neighbor, Ezekial Baldwin.
“How so?”
“She goes off, like. Into some sorta daze. Don’t seem to hear me when I speak to her, don’t seem to know what’s goin’ on for the longest time. Then all at once she’s back.”
“She’s broody,” Baldwin declared with the authority of a man who had sired seven children.
But though Liam watched Annie’s waist hopefully, it showed no sign of thickening.
The long winter passed, punctuated by Christmas and New Year and the first eager references to sugaring-off. “When the sap rises,” Daniel told Johnny, “we’ll sugar-off.”
The prospect was almost more exciting than Christmas. The boy remembered from former years the sound of metal tubes being banged into the sugar maples, the clank of buckets as they were carried around and suspended from the protruding metal, the slow drip of the running sap into the buckets, the incredibly sweet fragrance of the boiling sap. And best of all, the thrill of dropping a ladle full of hot sap onto unmelted snow and then eating the confection thus formed.
“When, Papa?” the child asked almost every day. “When is sugarin’-off gonna be?”
“Not yet, boy, not yet. Not till the thaw starts and the trees begin warmin’ up.”
“When will that be?”
“It’s in God’s hands,” Liam said.
But Annie knew. She knew almost to the exact moment. Liam returned to the cabin from the barn one morning to have her meet him at the door, with one word on her lips.
“Thaw,” she said.
“Not yet, Annie. It’s fixin’ to blow up another blizzard out there!”
She shook her head. “Thaw,” she repeated.
The blizzard the sky had threatened never developed. A wind blew up the spine of the mountains, driving the clouds before it like strayed sheep. In the wake of the wind’s passage the sun shone, the earth warmed.
Water dripped steadily from the melting icicles along the eaves.
It was the earliest thaw in a decade.
Liam looked at his wife with wonder in his eyes.
“Go into town as soon as the road’s passable,” Annie told him. “Order your seed, you’ll be able to plant. Mud season’s not going to last long this year.”
She could feel it; could feel the heat in the stone underlying New Hampshire, knew the snow would melt and run off and the earth would dry early, ready for the seed.
When Liam entered the Conway Feed Store a surprised Foster greeted him with, “Didn’t’spect to see you for a while yet, Murphy.”
“Wanna order seed now,” Liam replied. “Brought the wagon. Gonna be plantin’ soon.”
The men gathered around the potbellied stove laughed. “You’re soft in the head,” one told him. “It’s way too soon, we’ll be wadin’ in mud a while yet.”
“Nope. Annie says get ready to plant.”
Foster did not laugh. He sold Liam the seed. There was something cold and angry behind his eyes, however.
The viscous New Hampshire mud firmed, and in that brief but glorious season between the mud and the coming of the black flies and mosquitoes, Liam Murphy planted his crops before anyone else. His harvest would be the first to market, commanding the best prices.
No one would laugh at him anymore.
“I reckon I’m gonna be able to build a reg‘lar second story on this house,’stead of just a sleepin’ loft,” Liam told Annie proudly. “Have us a coupla bedrooms up there. Mebbe even put a pump inside so you can have runnin’ water indoors for your cookin’.”
She smiled wanly. “That’ll be nice.”
“Nice! It’s what I alluz meant to do, give you as good a house as your pa had in Jackson. Better, even. Give you the finest house in the Saco Valley, you’ll see.”
“That’s nice,” she said again.
She was not the same Annie. The change was deeply troubling to Liam. Yet the change included an uncanny ability to predict the weather, an ability that was worth more than gold to any farmer.
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, Liam concluded.
He never suspected his wife of witchcraft. She was Annie.
It was high summer before she visited the boulder on Pine Hill again. She did not want to; would have given almost anything not to go. But Liam’s crops were in the ground and the rains had not come. With the passing of months, her tormenting vision had faded. Sometime around midsummer she had ceased to be certain of the weather.
Liam stood on the porch of the cabin and gazed out at the sky. Hot, blue, shimmering. Cloudless.
“You reckon we’re gonna have rain soon, Annie?” he called over his shoulder to his wife. It was a question he was asking with increasing urgency. The dirt was powder dry. Crops were visibly wilting.
Annie stood behind him in the doorway. “I don’t know.”
“You’ve known all year, why don’t you know now?” He turned to look back at her. For the first time, he noticed streaks of silver in her dark hair.
“I just don’t.” Annie went back into the cabin.
Liam took Johnny to the fields with him that day. As soon as he was out of sight, Annie bundled up the baby and carried her to the Baldwins’ farm. “I need her tended for a while,” she told May Baldwin, who responded with a lifted eyebrow but a willing nod. Folks did for one another. Raising barns or tending babies, folks did for one another.
Annie set out for Pine Hill with a pounding heart. I can’t let Liam down, she thought.
Perhaps the stone would speak to her again, and in the speaking renew its gift.
Or it might kill her. She accepted the possibility. Anything with so much power might kill her. The journey on which it sent her might be enough to stop her heart—or leave her trapped forever this time, inside stone.
Yet Annie went on.
The stone eats babies.
Daniel Foster had said that was a lie.
But the stone had claimed victims; Indian victims. As the mountain in Albany had claimed Chocurua.
Maybe the stone will want my blood this time, Annie thought.
She tried to make her feet stop walking. But they were on the path now. They walked on in spite of her.
Up the hill that sang with summer. Toward the crest, then down. Toward the stone.
It waited for her.
It had no choice. No particle of earth, whether loose sand or compacted rock, could move by itself. An outside agency was required.
So the Pine Hill boulder must wait as the earth itself waited, for the action of wind and fire and water, for lightning and glacier and earthquake.
For Annie.
Annie Murphy was a better conductor for its petrified thought than Foster men had ever been. The aura of her energy was strong and clear, easily used to forge a connection with other cells of the earth. Mountains, rocks, pebbles, sand. Annie’s energy could link the whole.
The stone, solitary, waited.
Annie stopped a few yards short of its weathered face. “I’m here,” she said aloud as if to announce her presence to a sentient being. A sovereign being, with the power of life and death.
The stone waited. It could do nothing else.
Step by reluctant step, Annie moved closer. “Help me,” she said.
The stone had no comparable concept for “help.” To help implied physical action.
The stone could only wait.
“I should have brought you something, shouldn’t I?” Annie said, tardily realizing. “Corn, maybe. But we don’t have any crops yet. Be a while. Maybe not at all, if we don’t get the rain. I need to know about the rain.”
She took a last step forward, until she was close enough to touch the stone if she merely reached out her hand.
“I need to know about the rain!” she pleaded.
“I knew you were doin’ this!” cried a triumphant voice.
Daniel Foster came running toward her. His face was as black as thunder.
“Stealin’!” he shouted. “that’s what it is, Annie Murphy. You’re stealin’ money outta my pocket! The stone don’t talk to me no more. It talks to you. You gotta make it stop, you gotta make it talk to me again. You don’t need them visions!”
He skidded to a stop beside her—careful not to touch the stone.
She tried to give him a blank look, but Annie was not good at dissembling. “My husband needs to know the weather same as any farmer,” she said.
“Give my gift back to me and I’ll do his predictin’ for free,” Foster offered.
She looked at him sadly. “I don’t know how to give it back.”
“But you sure knew how to steal it, didn’t you?” he accused.
“Not on purpose. Swear to God, I didn’t do it on purpose. It just came to me. I touched the rock, and it came to me.”
“’Twarn’t meant for you. It’s mine!” Blood suffused Foster’s face. The cords in his neck stood out strongly above the open collar of his blue shirt. Annie was afraid he meant to hit her. She took a step back, away from him, away from the boulder.
He followed like a cat stalking a bird. “You give back what you stole from me.”
“How?” At that moment Annie would have gladly given him the gift—the curse. To be rid of it forever!
A slow smile curled Foster’s lips, though it never reached his eyes. His eyes were like two chips of flint.
“You don’t never come to this stone empty-handed, that’s what my pa taught me,” he said. “Alluz bring an offering for the stone. If you want somethin’, you gotta give somethin’.”
Annie glanced around. She saw no burlap bundle. “What did you bring this time?”
His smile widened. “I didn’t bring anything. You did.”
“I didn’t …”
“Yes you did. You brought yourself.”
A shudder ran through Annie’s body. I knew this all along, she thought with horror. I knew the stone would want my blood.
Abruptly, Foster dodged to his left, trapping her between himself and the boulder. “Come to me, pretty Annie,” he said softly. He held out his hand. “Come to me. You owe me a debt. You’re gonna pay it. We alluz pay our debts in Conway.”
He’s mad! she thought with horror.
Foster reached for her. She shrank back against the boulder, expecting a lightning flash, a monstrous jolt, a moment of unbelievable pain …
Nothing happened.
Annie Murphy stood with her back pressed against the rough surface of the granite and stared at Daniel Foster.
He hesitated, vaguely surprised. The length of the woman’s torso was pressed against the stone, yet she showed no reaction.
“Don’t you feel anything?” he asked.
“No.”
“No hum?”
“No.”
“Don’t you … see somethin’? Anything? Kinda murky, like? Like clouds gatherin’, and a sense of the weather about to change … ?”
“No,” Annie told him a third time.
His face tightened with anger. “The stone’s gone dead to you too, has it? You’ve damaged it somehow, that’s what you’ve done. Fool woman, interferin’ where you didn’t belong. Outsider. I shoulda known, I shoulda …”
What he should have done, Daniel Foster never said. As he spoke, he reached for Annie’s shoulder, and the moment his fingers closed on her the words froze in his mouth. He stood like a pillar of stone, mouth gaping, eyes bugging from his head.
Annie felt something run through her like a mighty river. Her body was covered with instant gooseflesh as her hair stirred and lifted. Vision dimmed. Foster’s face was replaced by a silvery shimmer that flickered like the outer limits of consciousness. A vast nausea swept through her, followed by a sensation of cold as hot as fire; of heat as cold as ice. A diamond-lit memory of hurtling through the space between the stars …
She came back to herself.
She stood beside the Pine Hill boulder. The smell of sun-baked stone was in her nostrils. She could hear wind soughing in the pines on the crest of the hill. Somewhere a bird sang three crisp, sweet notes, paused, then followed them with an elaborate trill.
The Elementals Page 22
